Sunday, 4 November 2012

A Medieval Manuscript Comes Home to Wales

Prof. Paul Russell writes:

In the early eighteenth
century a manuscript of medieval Welsh law, formerly owned by William Philips
(1663–1721), Recorder for the town of Brecon, found its way to America. The
details are unclear but Philips’s daughter married into the Scourfield family
of New Moat, Pembroke and his library passed to them, and it is probably no
coincidence that a Morris Scourfield was one of the first recorded purchasers
of land for the Pennsylvania community. At some point before its departure for
America the main text of the MS was foliated by Edward Lhuyd as a result of
which we know how many leaves are now missing. The MS first surfaces in the library of the
Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston as a gift, probably in the early
nineteenth century, and became their MS. 5.

In early 2012 it emerged that the MS was to be sold
through Sotheby’s in London at an auction on 10 July 2012. The description
composed by Sotheby’s, which made some interesting claims about the nature of
the text and language, left it in no doubt that they were hoping for a wealthy
American buyer; it ended, ‘It seems impossible that any such witness would ever
again be allowed export from the United Kingdom, and so this must be the final appearance
of this language on the open market’. The previous occasion a medieval Welsh MS
came up for sale was in 1923 when the National Library of Wales (NLW) purchased
the Hendregadredd MS (NLW MS 6680) for £150. The estimate on the Boston MS was £500,000–700,000.

I
had been asked by the National Library of Wales to examine the MS and write
report on it with a view to a bid being made. So in late June, Daniel Huws,
former keeper of manuscripts at the NLW, Maredudd ap Huw, manuscripts librarian
at the NLW, and I met in London and spent the afternoon with the MS. It was
immediately clear, despite the carefully selected photographs in the catalogue,
that the MS was in very poor condition – coloured initials cut out, pages
damaged to the point of near shredding, and general all-round distress – and a
hot summer’s day in the Sotheby’s office was doing it no good at all. The time,
however, was well spent giving the MS as close as an examination as it had probably
had for a long time – not least because we might never have seen it again. On
the basis of our reports and one also from a conservator send down from
Aberystwyth, the Heritage Lottery Fund agreed
to put up the majority of the funding with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the
Welsh Government.

When
10 July came around, I watched the auction on line in my office, and it was
immediately clear that prices were very subdued. When lot 23 came up, it went
for £450,000 (£520,000 with the buyer’s premium) and I knew the MS was going
home. By the same afternoon, it had already acquired an NLW number – NLW MS 24029A
– though among the medieval Welsh lawyers it will continue to be known by the
siglum ‘Bost’ (if nothing else, as an important reminder of its eventful
career).

The
news of the purchase caused great excitement in Wales and it was put on display in the Library for several
weeks before it was removed for conservation. On 20 September I met Daniel and
Maredudd in the back-rooms of the Library to watch the MS being dismantled and
the beginning of the long process of conservation. Despite the amount paid for
the MS, it was clear that it needed complete dis-binding and every leaf repaired
and conserved, and the only way that amount of money could be justified was to
do everything to preserve it for the future. Every stage of the process was
recorded; every bit of the binding preserved; every single loose fragment of
vellum preserved. The first thing to go was the binding which has been too
tight and was part of the problem as it had never let the vellum expand and
contract with changes of temperature. It was then left overnight to allow the
glue on the spine to soak and soften. The next day the sewing threads were cut
and the MS came apart in our hands, and the real work could begin.

PR
examines one of the more intact openings

So why does any of this
matter?

While the tradition of medieval
Welsh law is traced back to the reign of Hywel Dda (died 950), the earliest
surviving MSS date from the mid-thirteenth century; between then and the
sixteenth century there are surviving some thirty or more MSS, most in Welsh but
some in Latin. The Welsh MSS fall into three groups, or redactions, the
Iorwerth redaction (originally from Gwynedd), the Cyfnerth redaction (from the
south and east of Wales), and the Blegywryd redaction (from the south-west, and
in origin deriving from a Welsh translation of one of the Latin versions of the
law). Although the use of Welsh law was probably more restricted after the fall
of Gwynedd in 1282, it remained strikingly resilient and found a continued
importance in the Marches where the
validity of a case might well have depended on a prior claim based on Welsh
law. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the MSS of Welsh law from
the fourteenth century and later come from the east of Wales, and in recent
years there has been a growing interest in these later aspects of the history
of Welsh law.

An
example of a less than intact opening and why the MS was badly in need of
conservation.

The Boston MS is one such. It belongs to the Blegywryd
redaction and its text would originally have been in use in the south and west
of Wales. Wherever the original provenance of the main text (and Daniel Huws
suggests that this MS may have been copied at Strata Florida in the middle of
the fourteenth century), it appears from the later annotation that the MS can
be associated with Brecon.

One
feature of the Blegywryd MSS, all of which seem to date to the fourteenth
century or later, is that they tend to have a ‘tail’ of material often derived
from the other redactions; it seems that, when these text were used in the
March, the distinction between redactions was less important than simply having
as full a law text as possible. For example, Oxford, Jesus College MS 57, a MS
copied by Hywel Fychan, the main scribe of the Red Book of Hergest, has a long
‘tail’of material mainly deriving from
the Iorwerth redaction. In that case, the whole text is in the hand of Hywel
Fychan and we can only tell that there is a ‘tail’by comparison with other MSS.

Maredudd ap Huw and PR check
the collation

In
this respect the Boston MS is extremely important: it has a ‘tail’but it is in several different hands and
clearly shows evidence of the cumulative gathering of extra legal material over
a period of time. There are several phases: the main text ends on p. 181 (I use
the pagination as this part of the MS was not foliated by Lhuyd) and there is
extra material on the lower part of the page; a contemporary but rougher hand
has then added legal material on the next few pages. However, subsequently – and
this is one of the unique features of this MS – a gathering of six leaves was
inserted after the current p. 182 containing a section of text in a finer, more
professional hand from a different slightly later MS. We might imagine that
this gathering was lying around and tucked into the back of the Boston MS for
safe-keeping. This video clip shows me removing the extra
gathering and indicating that, once it
is removed, the text either side is continuous. It is worth dwelling on the
fact that that was probably the first time it had been removed since ca 1360. It will of course be re-bound
back in the same place.

One
could envisage that, if this MS had then been copied, the distinctions between
these different additions in the ‘tail’ would have been lost. As it is,
however, this MS provides us with a precious example of the creation a
‘tail’ and tells us something we could
only have guessed at, namely that, while text was copied from other sources,
another mode of ‘tail-creation’, as it were, was by simply inserting pages
from another MS. In other words, this is a working-copy, much closer to the
reality and practice of the law than a tidy version like Jesus College 57, and
all the more valuable and useful for that.

Daniel Huws and PR discuss
the collation of the dis-bound MS laid out in quires on the desk.

What now ?

The MS is now undergoing
repair conservation leaf by leaf and will be soon in a condition to be
digitised; the images will then in due course be available to be
consulted on the NLW’s Digital Mirror. Interesting details are still emerging; for
example, when the MS was disbound, tacket holes were visible on some of the
bifolia suggested that quires might have been held together with fine vellum strips
before it was bound.

A conservator repairs a leaf
on a light-box (tacket holes are visible just below the right-most finger)

It now emerges that in
quire 4 only there are worm holes in the vellum. Putting these details
together, it would appear that the MS might have remained unbound for some time
with the individual quires held together with tackets. Another intriguing
glimpse into how it might have been used, and no doubt more will emerge from
further study. The MS will be rebound and two facsimile copies will be made in
addition, one of which will be bound so as to allow demonstration of the
arrangement of quires and insertions. The purchase of this MS has provided an
extraordinary opportunity to be able to observe the dismantling of a MS book,
and in some ways its relatively poor condition has allowed things to be seen
and learnt which would be impossible with a better preserved book. Already
students in ASNC are finding out what an important learning and teaching
resource this MS can be, and I hope others can benefit from what has been
learnt in conserving this MS for future generations.

Many thanks to the National
Library for permission to use the photographs, and in particular to Maredudd ap
Huw and Daniel Huws, the conservation staff, Iwan Bryn James, Elgar Pugh, and Dilwyn
Williams, and the photographers, Mark Davey and Michael Jones. More news and pictures can be found on the Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru blog. [Edit: further updates on the National Library of Wales blog here]

1 comment:

Nice post. It shows how rich could a literature be in terms of translation.Through translating shows the rich blend of knowledge and culture in a society.Whether in Welsh translation or in any foreign language translation helps one to get acquainted with the thoughts, traditions, principles and actions of the people from the region.I can't see machines taking over the jobs of human translators in the near future, as they have done with so many other professions.

About Me

This blog is written and maintained by members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. We study the history, languages, literatures and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
For more information about us go to: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk